Here's an excerpt from IBMs corporate responsibility web site. I thought I'd share it with you because we've been hearing a lot lately about climate change and such, and this outlines what IBM is doing - and has been doing for years - around protecting and preserving our environment.

IBM’s longstanding commitment to environmental protection was first formalized as a corporate policy in 1971. From how we run our operations to the products and solutions we provide to our clients, we are committed to leadership across environmental areas ranging from energy efficiency and water conservation to pollution prevention and product stewardship.

Energy conservation has been a major component of IBM's comprehensive climate protection programs because the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions by the utilities powering the company's facilities and from the use of fuel for heating or cooling represents the greatest potential climate impact associated with IBM's operations. Because of that, a principal focus of IBM's climate objectives has been its energy conservation goal.

IBM has been tracking it energy consumption since 1973 and has had a specific, numeric annual energy conservation goal for decades. The results of this early focus on energy conservation have been significant. For example, between 1990 and 2008, IBM saved 4.9 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity consumption, avoided nearly 3.3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions, an amount equal to 48 percent of the company's 1990 global CO2 emissions, and saved over $343 million through its annual energy conservation actions.

There are many specific issues around energy and the environment that are increasing the urgency for organizations to change the way they do things in order to achieve and sustain energy efficiencies. And these pressures are coming in various forms, not the least of which is the rising cost and uncertain availability of energy. We all know that energy is scarce and that prices tend to fluctuate. Humor me for a moment as I attempt to use an example to illustrate the challenge. One of my colleagues talks about the VP of a company that he’s working with around energy management, and this person talks about his yearly budget being allocated fairly equally to three different areas: CapEx, labor or people, and energy. And when we think of plotting that out over time, let’s say over a five year period, it should be fairly simple to control and maintain our capital expenditures and people costs, or at least predict what those costs might be. But if we look back at the history of where energy costs have been over the past few years, you realize that it becomes difficult to predict where these costs might be one or two years down the road, much less five years. And with demand expected to increase, those costs could be significantly higher than might be expected. How can a company address this issue as it tries to run the business in a more sustainable manner?

Really, who actually cares about how much energy is being consumed in the data center? It appears that in more than a few cases there is a “teenager” phenomenon occurring. Have you ever tried to get your teenage son or daughter to consistently turn off the lights or TV when they leave the room? If your experiences are like mine, you would probably have more success pushing a rope uphill. The challenge is that teenagers don’t care because they don’t pay the electric bill. They know somewhere locked inside the recesses of their brain that it’s the right thing to do, but at the end of the day, that alone doesn’t seem to make a difference. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing IT Managers to teenagers, I’m just saying that unless there’s a vested interest in an outcome, then there’s probably not a lot of action that’s going to be taken.

So why should an IT Manager care about the energy consumed in the data center? Let me start with one possible reason, and see if other contributors will add their perspective.

While it’s not the most common type of outage, there are occurrences of disruptions to the power or air conditioning that can have an impact on service availability. Does an end user really care if the application is down because of a network, server, or air conditioning problem? The answer is no! If the IT Manager has established documented Service Level Agreements, then it’s in his/her best interest to do an effective job to maintain those service levels by managing all elements that could impact an outage… and that includes power or air conditioning.

Is green still on your radar screen when it comes to managing your data center assets? If not, perhaps it should be. A greener data center can be achieved through various means, not the least of which is gaining efficiencies in the area of power (energy) usage. And there are many indirect ways to increase energy efficiency in the data center. Consider if you will virtualization, asset management, storage management, and cloud computing as potential contributors to a more energy efficient, "greener" data center. For the purposes of today's blog, let's focus on virtualization - and the notion that "green comes with it".

Through virtualization, you can improve data center efficiency by raising the utilization of servers. I've heard many times that most computing resources (CPU) are left untapped on a single server. A global study of server energy and efficiency supported by the Alliance to Save Energy found that 72% of server managers believe that 15% or more of their servers were not doing any useful work. Consolidating multiple applications and workloads that run on separate devices to a single, partitioned server reduces the number of actual servers needed to handle current as well as future demands. And fewer servers means increased utilization, which in turn means that less power is required to operate and cool them, resulting in a more efficient - energy and cost-wise - and environmentally friendly data center.

And when we talk about virtualization, we shouldn't forget about the network. As servers have sprawled, so has the network that's required for access to and communication with those servers. In some cases it's thought that networking equipment can contribute as much as 20% -25% of the power load. As servers are condolidated and virtualized, there too can be a significant opportunity to simplify the network as well, and drive additional savings in the areas of energy use and cost, and reduced environmental impact.

So if you think about the above, if should become clear that some green benefits of virtualization can include:

Lowered carbon emissions due to the reduction in hardware and energy use = a cleaner environment

And let's not forget that consolidation can certainly lower capital and operational costs as well

You may not think of green when you think of virtualization, but the potential benefits are compelling and should be part of the equation when thinking about the impact that virtualization could have on your IT infrastructure.

Come see us at Pulse 2010 in Las Vegas, February 21-24, booth 51.

Share Your Story @ Pulse

This year at Pulse 2010 we are
scheduling video tape interviews with clients who are willing to share
their thoughts on what they are doing to achieve visibility, control,
and automation in their infrastructure. We will be filming client
videos at Pulse starting Sunday, February 21, through Wednesday,
February 24. The content will be used to produce short videos that we
will leverage to illustrate the needs clients are addressing in their
organizations. Our customers have been sharing their stories throughout
2009 as you can see below. Interested in participating? Notify me at khelbig@us.ibm.com if you are interested in telling your energy efficiency story.

Effective
monitoring of IT, data center and facility assets can bring positive
savings to companies that are paying attention to it. Based on a
survey I read recently, decreased energy use (or greater energy
efficiency) and increased cooling efficiency were mentioned as the
biggest benefits that data center and facility managers are seeing from
their green efforts. In reality, these companies should probably also
realize that, in most cases, they may have to invest a little in
technology to see real benefits. Easier said than done in today's
economic climate, but worth investigating.

Getting started

Where
can a company get started on a path toward a more energy efficient IT
infrastructure? Start by gaining thorough visibility in to (or discovering)
your actual IT (servers, etc.), data center (CRAC units, etc.) and
facility assets, and how they are being used. Once you can see your
assets and how they are performing, you can begin to take the necessary
actions required to optimize those assets. This might come in the form
of simply using your technology assets to their fullest capacity, or
even a simple understanding of where your assets might require less
cooling when they are idle. A better utilized, better performing
asset should likewise be a more energy efficient asset. Let me put it
like this: see what you have, understand how it is being (or not being)
used, and adjust accordingly.

What should an energy monitoring solution provide?

As I said, visibility into energy consumption is key. Energy monitoring software
should act as the "collector" if you will of sensor data from IT, data
center and facility equipment. It should provide visibility to help
manage the data center environment (think back to what I mentioned
about "discovering" earlier). It should help you gain insight into
energy and thermal information for such equipment and infrastructure
and should enable the optimization of the monitored environment from a
centralized point of control. It should allow information to be stored
in real-time to leverage historic, and trending energy and thermal
metrics in a common repository to help you make better informed
decisions around energy management. Lastly, it should allow the
collected data to be used by other solutions such as thermal visualization, dashboard, and applications that help you understand your costs and track, allocate and invoice by multiple criteria.

You
may not have to have a huge budget to better monitor your assets. And
you may not even need extra people either. Before you make the
decision NOT to invest, do your homework. Look for the criteria
outlined above. Explore solutions that monitor IT, data center and
facility assets. Understand the full scope of what you might need to
do. You might be surprised to find out that it's not as big of an
undertaking as you may think. And the rewards are many fold.

Share your thoughts by commenting on this blog or joining one of our energy management communities.

On October 20, 2009, IBM announced several new and enhanced offerings designed to help our customers succeed in an increasingly complex and interconnected world. The announcements reinforce the vision of a Dynamic Infrastructure and support our client's desire to improve service, reduce cost and manage risk, while also laying the foundation to take advantage of future business and IT needs.

The solutions and capabilities announced enhance the visibility, control, and automation across an organization's business and IT assets.

Among these solutions is Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization 7.1. We've talked about this solution in the past (see "Heat maps, anyone? a.k.a. Thermal visualization in the data center"). MEO, as we call it for short, helps increase visibility of energy and thermal information with data center heat maps that help IT and facilities managers see thermal anomalies in a real-time, visual format. This allows them to take swift, corrective actions in order to optimize assets and ultimately reduce energy costs.

How does this relate to a Dynamic Infrastructure? Today's business environment is challenging on many fronts. And your IT infrastructure is no exception. You need to cut energy usage and cost, and you must meet increasing demands from your customers, partners and employees. You need to help your business stay ahead of the competition, but you have to do it all with a limited budget. Thus, you need a secure, flexible, intelligent and dynamic infrastructure to be successful. And visibility on to your data center and facilities assets is one place to focus your efforts. Because saving energy saves you money. Check out Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization for yourself.

In preparation for Pulse 2010 in Vegas, I interviewed Vik Chandra, the Pulse track lead for Energy and Efficiency, to help you generate good ideas for submitting your call for speaker abstracts for Pulse. Vik will actually be reviewing the submissions with a team of other folks, so you can really trust his advice. Here’s what he had to say:

Me: What are hot topics in the area of Energy and Efficiency right now? Which topics would you really like to see presented at Pulse?

Vik: The focus of going green is on reducing costs. The first step to going green is to gain visibility into energy consumption end-to-end across the infrastructure. The attendees at Pulse would benefit from learning about your experiences including:

What triggered your organization to look at reducing energy consumption?

What were the goals/motivations of the different parts of your organization?

Why you selected a particular solution

How was the experience of deploying the solution?

What results/benefits have you seen from the solution?

How has your organization communicated the results of energy efficiency efforts internally and externally?

What are the next steps in your energy efficiency efforts?

Me: Who are good candidates for submitting abstracts, and why?

Vik: Energy efficiency activities span the entire infrastructure. IT organizations have different challenges from facility organizations and from manufacturing organizations as an example, Execs and leaders within the sustainability or operations organizations that are currently implementing or exploring energy management solutions will be ideal speakers.

Me: What are you looking for in a good proposal?

Vik: A good proposal should be educational, motivational and practical. Ideally, your peers should be able to learn from your experience to initiate their own energy management projects. It's important to note that you don't have to have demonstrable energy savings to deliver a successful proposal. There are significant lessons to be learn from your experiences on simply getting to the point of deciding on energy efficiency projects

Me: What are the benefits of submitting an abstract for Pulse?

Vik: Free admission to Pulse ($1,995 value) and recognition for yourself and your organization as leaders in the area of Energy Efficiency.

With such great guidance from Vik, you’re sure to write a perfect proposal. If you have any questions on submitting abstracts for Pulse or want feedback on an idea, just leave a blog comment or feel free to email me. Also, be sure to check out this justification letter if you need that extra edge to convince your boss of the value of attending Pulse. I hope to see you there!

On September 17th, IBM released a new version of Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization to help customers tackle energy and environmental management problems both inside and outside of the data center. This new release expands the product to collect and visualize facilities energy and environmental data, tying this information to key asset management processes for a complete solution. This release expands the visualization of energy and environmental information beyond temperature to include humidity, power, and other customer visualizations. It also includes new analytics to help analyze the efficiency of air conditioning equipment and locate and visualize hot spots.

In addition to these new features, Maximo for Energy Optimization 7.1.1 includes a "lightweight" version of Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management. The included monitoring tool supports facilities equipment from a number of vendors, including Johnson Controls, Siemens, Eaton, and APC. It also includes the ability to collect data from other sources.

On 19 March 2010, IBM will release Tivoli Storage Manager v6.2. Read more about it at the Tivoli Storage team blog. How does this relate to Pulse you might ask? You can learn more about what's going on with Tivoli storage solutions by checking out out the storage roadmap at Pulse 2010 (also on the Tivoli storage blog).

So let's talk about storage and green...that's why you are reading this, right? When we think about "green", we usually think about energy and eco-efficiency. But what we don't often think about is the fact that there are may ways to get to those green benefits outside of energy monitoring and management. Enter storage (we'll talk about a few other areas in future posts). How can you improve storage utilization for an energy efficient storage environment? You can reduce power consumption by reducing the amount of disk capacity required to keep data assets tuned and available to the business. More specifically:

What are the green benefits? I like to use the phrase "green comes with it". That is, by doing some of the above things to optimize your storage environment, you can realize a more energy efficient and environmentally friendly data center on the whole. Such benefits might include:

It's Monday and Pulse 2010 is open and people from all over the country and world are still filing in to the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada for Pulse 2010! Pulse 2010 is the premier service management event and this year's theme is "Optimizing the World's Infrastructure". If you are here, we're glad you are, and you will definitely want to check out the breakout sessions that are planned throughout the week around energy and efficiency. And tonight, you can stop by one of two peds focused on energy and efficiency, namely the Energy Management ped (#51), and the Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization ped (#26). Both peds will be staffed tonight from 5PM - 9PM, and we hope you will stop by to learn more about our energy management solutions.

Here's a quick primer on the solutions we'll be showcasing throughout the conference:

IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management is our core energy management solution. Simply stated, it allows you to monitor and manage energy, and helps you gain insight into energy and thermal information for IT equipment, data center infrastructure and facilities equipment and enable the optimization of the monitored environment from a centralized point of control. Be sure to stop by ped 51 for a closer look.

IBM Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization further supports energy and environmental optimization of data center assets with visual mapping. It integrates energy into service management processes, provides information to make better decisions about energy management, and includes mapping capabilities for energy and environmental metrics to identify issues that may effect costs or availability.

And let's not forget the "Ask the Experts" sessions planned Throughout the conference.

Be sure to watch us on Twitter (http://twitter.com/karlhelbig) for updates throughout the conference.

The excitement is mounting... the clock is ticking... we're just a few short DAYS away from Pulse 2010 at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas!

I've blogged a couple of times around our Energy & Efficiency agenda and demo pedestals already, but I wanted to take a minute to let you know about our "Meet the Experts" sessions that are scheduled at the conference. We've got a great lineup of energy & efficiency experts for you to speak with, as follows:

So stop by, ask a question or two, and pick their brains. And don't forget to stop by the Energy Management (#51) and Maximo Asset Management for Energy Optimization (#26) demo pedestals on the exhibition floor.

I'm sure you all know that Pulse 2010 is less than two weeks away. I just wanted to take another opportunity to let you know that Energy & Efficiency is well represented at this year's event. Our presence this year is three-fold, with a strong Energy & Efficiency presentation track, including presentations from IBM, our partners, and of course our customers. We also have two demonstration pedestals on the exhibition floor, as well as time to "Meet the Experts" for energy management. Let's break these down one at a time:

Tuesday February 23:- Managing Large-Scale Virtualization for Energy Efficiency- Virtualization Best Practices to Maximize ROI- IBM Service Management for Energy and Utilities -IBM Energy Management Stack: Integrations and Openness -Essential Elements to Incorporate into a Management Dashboard to Support Energy and Environmental Goals -Green Principles and Service Management

Pulse 2010 is just over 3 weeks away, so I thought I would give you a sneak preview of how the Energy & Efficiency track agenda is shaping up. If you are coming to Pulse 2010 and want to build your agenda in advance of the conference, head over to the Pulse web site and you can do so. And don't forget to stop by the Energy Management ped (#51) in the solution expo. I look forward to meeting you there.

Tuesday February 23:- Managing Large-Scale Virtualization for Energy Efficiency- Virtualization Best Practices to Maximize ROI- IBM Service Management for Energy and Utilities -IBM Energy Management Stack: Integrations and Openness -Essential Elements to Incorporate into a Management Dashboard to Support Energy and Environmental Goals -Green Principles and Service Management

Energy management is no longer just an option for organizations today; it’s a strategic imperative. There are growing pressures to control costs in challenging economic times and to operate responsibly amid concerns about climate change. Achieving energy efficiency across the vast range of systems and assets within an organization is essential. So why not take a closer look at your technology infrastructure and see if you can better manage how energy is being used?

Measuring and managing energy and thermal performance is often considered the foundation for most energy management capabilities. It involves gaining the necessary visibility into current energy and thermal data as well as the related costs. And it should provide a consolidated and more granular view of energy usage, and a baseline that can be used to compare performance against industry metrics or internal past performance. Once the energy and thermal information is collected and stored, organizations will have the data to:

Today, December 15, 2009, IBM released Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management Interim Feature v6.2.1.01. This release added new support for Siemens building management, which integrates the energy and environmental management solutions delivered by Siemens and IBM in order to provide a common solution that spans IT, data centers, buildings, and beyond. This release also added additional support for custom energy management agents and makes it even easier to integrate custom data into energy and environmental reports and portlets along with data from sources that Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management collects with its native integrations.

These new files are generally available for use starting today, and we encourage customers to start using this new release right away. I'd also like to say thank you to our development team for all of their hard work in pushing this out the door before the end of 2009.